Answer for a friend

[untruestory]

I have a friend of mine that wrote this compounded argument as so why he lost faith. Can someone give me an intelligent, caring response? He’s a guy that prides himself on his intelligence and has a degree in psychology. Here’s what he says:
I gave it some deep thought and research and decided there wasn’t a religion that made sense to me. I’m persuadable however I’ve tipped to one side and here’s my reason. To be a Christian you have to believe in a jealous, tinkering, capricious, incompetent, and clumsy God. Please don’t take that as an insult rather an opinion to be backed by the following: Scientists oscillate between 250,000 and 100,000 years humans have been around in our form. Let’s take the latter to be fair because that’s what Christian Scientist and head of the human genome project Francis Collins has shown. For most of 98,000 years humans are born, many dying at birth or killing their mother in the process. Life expectancy around 25 either dying of their teeth (painful as close to the brain as they are) or killed over superstition, fighting over food, women etc. They died of microorganisms they didn’t know existed; Genesis doesn’t mention them because the people who write it don’t know of microorganisms. Hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, tornados all mysterious events that may mean you must sacrifice people or blame a population for witchcraft for inducing this. War, famine, slavery, you can imagine how horrifying life was in those instances. Toward (relatively) more recent times a slight upward curve we very painfully made progress with suffering and labor with our solidarity intact (or we wouldn’t have made it).

You have to believe heaven watched this with indifference for 98,000 years and decided: maybe now it’s time to intervene. The best way to do this is to have a human sacrifice in a remote, uneducated, superstitious and barbaric part of Palestine and the news of this still hasn’t penetrated much of the world today. Never mind doing this in China where they can read and write or the Indus Valley. The way in which it was done strikes me as careless. The many gods who predate Jesus that have the same story is peculiar. This is a bit of plagiarism and often religions do this with one another.

Another thing I don’t understand is praising god. Thousands of years of being praised and the sums of praises aren’t enough…it must continue. Even after death or do we get a break? What god requires this? He is supposed to be our creator and the closest relation to this is your mother. When you were born and growing did she stand with her arms out demanding to be praised? Most parents love and nurture you and are content with mutual love and a god would be this way magnified by an unimaginable multitude. Instead has an ego that needs inflating according to the bible.

The idea of hell is one of the most wicked ideas. You’re on this earth for a fraction of a second in the scheme of things and you can be forever tortured and burned for depending on your beliefs, thought crime. It’s like a celestial North Korea. God knows every thought, every action and is keeping score and what threshold must be stayed inside of to avoid hell? If people go to hell it’s by design. Christians say we have free will, the boss insists upon it. That takes away its very nature. It simply must be and not given to us. I’ll leave it at that for now.

 

[Actaeon]

I have a friend of mine that wrote this compounded argument as so why he lost faith. Can someone give me an intelligent, caring response? He’s a guy that prides himself on his intelligence and has a degree in psychology. Here’s what he says:
I gave it some deep thought and research and decided there wasn’t a religion that made sense to me. I’m persuadable however I’ve tipped to one side and here’s my reason.

Your friend plaguerized almost 100% of this argument from the prolific atheist writer, Christopher Hitchens (God rest his eternal soul and have mercy on us all!)… In fact, I recognize some of the arguments verbatum. Let’s go through the arguments one by one, and I’ll kindly note that I’m drawing a bit from Dinesh D’Souza here (who utterly smashed Christopher Hitchens in a debate)

To be a Christian you have to believe in a jealous, tinkering, capricious, incompetent, and clumsy God.Please don’t take that as an insult rather an opinion to be backed by the following: Scientists oscillate between 250,000 and 100,000 years humans have been around in our form. Let’s take the latter to be fair because that’s what Christian Scientist and head of the human genome project Francis Collins has shown. For most of 98,000 years humans are born, many dying at birth or killing their mother in the process. Life expectancy around 25 either dying of their teeth (painful as close to the brain as they are) or killed over superstition, fighting over food, women etc. They died of microorganisms they didn’t know existed; Genesis doesn’t mention them because the people who write it don’t know of microorganisms. Hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, tornados all mysterious events that may mean you must sacrifice people or blame a population for witchcraft for inducing this.

I’m just going to break in here and note that Judaism never instituted human sacrifice… this is where your friend differs from Hitchens, because Hitchens would never make such a silly and inaccurate statement (that I’m aware of…)

War, famine, slavery, you can imagine how horrifying life was in those instances. Toward (relatively) more recent times a slight upward curve we very painfully made progress with suffering and labor with our solidarity intact (or we wouldn’t have made it).

You have to believe heaven watched this with indifference for 98,000 years and decided: maybe now it’s time to intervene.

Er… this statement has always been in utter ignorance of the fact that said intervention wasn’t intended to end all wars and suffering, but rather to make propitiery payment for sin… and that payment applied to all of the people who died before Christ as well. See, Jews believed (and still do believe) that when you die, your soul goes to a place of waiting, to eventually be released by God for salvation or condemnation. Christians hold, and always have held, that Jesus’ sacrifice was the moment that these souls were given their chance to accept God… all of them… every pagan, jew, gentile, etc throughout history was given their chance to rightly accept God.

In this regard, Hitchens relied on social ignorance of judaism and early christian beliefs in order to make this argument (or perhaps I give him too much credit about his own education, but I certainly assume that he was knowledgeable enough to know this argument was bunk when he said it)

The best way to do this is to have a human sacrifice in a remote, uneducated, superstitious and barbaric part of Palestine and the news of this still hasn’t penetrated much of the world today. Never mind doing this in China where they can read and write or the Indus Valley. The way in which it was done strikes me as careless.

And yet, to carry out said act in China would be completely at odds with the biblical history to that point (of the Jews being the chosen ones, who alone could enact the passover). Furthemore, while China would have allowed access to people who could read and write (in certain areas… in other areas the chinese were little more than barbarians), Israel offered something much better: the Roman Empire, trade routes, and access to the Eastern empire.

Also, it’s historically inaccurate to say that Israel at the time was populated by barbarians. It was a Roman province in the highly educated and affluent middle east…

As to the idea that the “news hasn’t penetrated much of the world today”… that’s bunk. The largest religion in the world, by far, is christianity. If we count the fact that muslims are a derivative of Christianity, and that they hold the new testament as scripture, then we find that almost half the world is made up by some form of Christianity or a derivation of it. That, my friends, is reach.

The many gods who predate Jesus that have the same story is peculiar. This is a bit of plagiarism and often religions do this with one another.

No, there aren’t. Claims such as Ishtar being the basis of easter, or that Osirus/Horus, or Mithra being the basis of Christianity have been thoroughly debunked. Again, this argument relies on social ignorance and the fact that many people will not research to find that links such as Mithra are utterly made up “facts” by atheist advocates.

Another thing I don’t understand is praising god. Thousands of years of being praised and the sums of praises aren’t enough…it must continue. Even after death or do we get a break? What god requires this? He is supposed to be our creator and the closest relation to this is your mother. When you were born and growing did she stand with her arms out demanding to be praised?

I revere my parents. They’re numbered among the very few human beings I consider to be true heros. I certainly know if I had spurned them the way that your friend spurns God, that I could expect my the back of my father’s hand (or, now that I’m grown, to be disowned). The idea that parent/child bonds are sustained by mutual love is bunk… utter bunk.

Most parents love and nurture you and are content with mutual love and a god would be this way magnified by an unimaginable multitude. Instead has an ego that needs inflating according to the bible.

This ignores the fact that both Judaism and Christianity hold that worship is important not because it is good for God, but because:

1. God deserves it, and therefore it is right that we give it
2. it is good for US, not for God (in the sense that it offers redemption).

The idea of hell is one of the most wicked ideas. You’re on this earth for a fraction of a second in the scheme of things and you can be forever tortured and burned for depending on your beliefs, thought crime. It’s like a celestial North Korea. God knows every thought, every action and is keeping score and what threshold must be stayed inside of to avoid hell? If people go to hell it’s by design. Christians say we have free will, the boss insists upon it. That takes away its very nature. It simply must be and not given to us. I’ll leave it at that for now.

chuckle another Hitchen’s quote, including that bit about the celestial North Korea… I almost blew my coffee through my nose when I first listened to that argument.

Hitchens here relies on the peasant level, middle ages explanation of Hell, prefering instead to stay away from any sort of true or intellectual explanation of hell promulgated throughout history in Christian doctrine: that Hell is the result of rejecting God… that we SEND OURSELVES to hell, and that we lock the gates from the inside (Dinesh D’Souza quote right there!).

You see, this argument only works if God angrily punishes people for their actions, and WANTS them to suffer… the reality is the opposite, that God desires redemption, and does not want anyone to reject Him. We are given EVERY OPPORTUNITY IMAGINABLE to accept God. We. choose. hell. The reality of Christian teaching negates this point beautifully.

 

[jschutzm]

I find that there are a lot of assumptions in that argument.

I wouldn’t try to attack ALL of them at once… because some of them are layered… they build upon one another.

So if you truly think that this guy is open to reconsidering his conclusions, then I would try to lay some ground rules and agree to pick out ONE issue and stick with that until it is resolved. Then move onto another related issue.

Try knocking them 1 by one… not all at once. And this will require you to not get sidetracked into other issues.

Perhaps start with a logical basis for the belief in God, period. The uncaused cause, the need for a rational source of logic. I like what St. Acquainas said… If there wasn’t a rational source which our minds came from… and if our rationality developed solely from the illogical minds of animals… then we have NO reason to trust any conclusions that our minds come to…because how can it be that rationality comes from illrationality?
Simply invoking billions of years of evolution doesn’t solve this problem. It only requires less faith.

Once he agrees about the need for a creator… perhaps the next best to tackle would be the idea that religions steal from one another and/or that Jesus is just a Mitha/Horus retelling. Secondly, that we SHOULD expect ideas and philosophies to spread… that is actually evidence that they are true. For a religion to be RIGHT, it doesn’t have to be completely unique, in fact if it were professing completely unique doctrines… we’d have more reason to doubt it.
But Jesus IS completely unique to Christianity.

Next, I might tackle WHY it occurred in the middle east and not somewhere else. This discussion may logically pull in why THEN and not at the beginning of time.
You will have to get him to accept that often times God has to wait for US to be ready, but ultimately, we may not fully understand God’s time. That does not on its own, disprove God.

 

[Rainaldo]

He’s a guy that prides himself on his intelligence and has a degree in psychology.

Then I would be right to expect intelligence and psychological insight from him.

But in my experience, when it comes to religion (and relationships!), diplomas don’t count for much.

I gave it some deep thought and research and decided there wasn’t a religion that made sense to me.

Funny, that’s how I settled on Catholicism. Anyhoo…

I’m persuadable however [insert laundry list of bad things that happen, which serves only show off your scientific book-knowledge while advertizing your near-total lack of insight into the Problem Of Evil]

No, Genesis 3 says all these things happen because Adam forfeited earthly paradise for himself and all of us. It wasn’t supposed to be that way, but consequences are consequences, and we all suffer because of it.

I guess your “research” missed that.

…a remote, uneducated, superstitious and barbaric part of Palestine…

I’m not going to waste time refuting that canard.

The many gods who predate Jesus that have the same story is peculiar. This is a bit of plagiarism and often religions do this with one another.

Sounds like your “research” consisted of an afternoon watching YouTube videos. Christianity is absolutely unique among world religions. A psychologist should be able to appreciate this. If you think Horus or Tammuz dying and coming back to life is “the same story” just because there are several thematic parallels discernible by an average high school literature student, then you need to brush up on your mythology, because you obviously haven’t researched the details of those earlier myths.

Another thing I don’t understand is praising god. Thousands of years of being praised and the sums of praises aren’t enough…it must continue. Even after death or do we get a break? What god requires this? He is supposed to be our creator and the closest relation to this is your mother. When you were born and growing did she stand with her arms out demanding to be praised? Most parents love and nurture you and are content with mutual love and a god would be this way magnified by an unimaginable multitude. Instead has an ego that needs inflating according to the bible.

I quoted this at length because of how blatantly transparent it is. Your argument, sir, has nothing to do with religion. Don’t you see that, Mr. Psychologist?

Anyway we worship God because he really is good in and of himself. Therefore it’s appropriate, for the right ordering of the universe, to worship him.

The idea of hell is one of the most wicked ideas. You’re on this earth for a fraction of a second in the scheme of things and you can be forever tortured and burned for depending on your beliefs, thought crime. It’s like a celestial North Korea. God knows every thought, every action and is keeping score and what threshold must be stayed inside of to avoid hell? If people go to hell it’s by design. Christians say we have free will, the boss insists upon it. That takes away its very nature. It simply must be and not given to us. I’ll leave it at that for now.

As a psychologist, you would be familiar with people who create their own hells. Tell me, why do they do it? Because their daddies are tyrants? Because their mommies are narcissists? No, it’s because some people choose to be miserable.

 

[untruestory]

Thanks guys, that’s some good info!
We’re stuck on the many gods with the same story argument now. He mentioned some book called 16 crucified gods of the world. Which, the whole crucifixion is historical so if there were myths about it before it doesn’t prove anything anyway.

 

[R_C]

St. John of the Cross said: “the devil speaks often through interior locutions, forming through suggestion to the intellect concepts and words, and through seemingly true and very subtle things he precipitates and deludes people. In this manner he communicates sometimes with some heretics, filling their minds with ideas and trails of thought that are very subtle, false and erroneous.”.

While this quote from the Doctor Mysticus may not seem politically correct in the age of ecumenism, its truth still holds.